By GARY RIVLIN

Published: September 20, 2005

In the period that some simply call ''before,'' employees working at the Liberty Bank and Trust Company headquarters, a six-story glass box in eastern New Orleans, sat at brand-new workstations in a building they had occupied only this past spring.

Now, the head office for this $350 million bank is a cramped branch here, a homely brick building with a corner of its corrugated tin roof missing. Two bank employees, seated on beat-up borrowed chairs behind a pair of folding tables, serve as the loan department for the bank's 13 branches. The table beside them is the one-employee insurance department. Four tables pushed together in the room's middle accommodate a makeshift call center.

At least now Liberty has working phones. It was not until 10 days after the hurricane hit on Aug. 29 that BellSouth installed temporary phone lines so that customers, virtually all of them in desperate financial straits, could find out when the bank would lift the temporary $100-a-day limit on A.T.M. withdrawals that lasted through Sept. 8.

Liberty, one of the country's largest black-owned banks, has long been a gleaming New Orleans business success story, a homegrown institution in a predominantly African-American city. It has outposts here and in Jackson, Miss., but its branches are mainly concentrated in the northeastern quadrant of New Orleans, a vastly underserved part of the city, home to its black working and middle classes.

Liberty's presence, in other words, was greatest precisely in that part of New Orleans most devastated by the storm and the waters that roared through much of the city after the levees broke.

''Where you saw water up to the rooftops,'' said Alden J. McDonald Jr., the chief executive. He grabbed a New Orleans map and drew small circles to indicate each of his eight branches in the city. The majority were just south of Lake Pontchartrain, in the devastated eastern half of the city. ''That's where my customer base lived. My employees lived out there.''

He shook his head and gave a sharp, raspy laugh. ''Hell, that's where I lived,'' said Mr. McDonald, who turned 62 last Friday and is also the chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. McDonald has agreed to allow a reporter to chronicle his efforts over the coming months by following him and members of the Liberty Bank staff as they work to rebuild in New Orleans. At the moment, theirs is a tale of a bank that is somehow managing to offer a full complement of services, even if it sometimes seems everything has been jerry-built using chewing gum and baling wire, and some of the employees are still unaccounted for.

The hurricane delivered a shocking blow to virtually every business along the Gulf Coast, but few were more devastated than Liberty, the largest black-owned bank in New Orleans. Five of its eight branches in the city were badly damaged by water, Mr. McDonald said. At least five were hit by looters, including two that were not flooded.

Insurance will offset much of the cost of that physical destruction, just as it will cover most of the damage to the hotels, restaurants and music clubs so essential to the city's future.

The tourist trade, however, relies on visitors from around the globe -- those financially untouched by the hurricane and its deadly aftermath. Liberty's future, in contrast, is inexorably entwined in the success of rebuilding New Orleans in areas far from the French Quarter, the Garden District and the central business area. Eighty percent of Liberty's business, Mr. McDonald said, had been based in New Orleans. Virtually all of his customers, he said, lived in neighborhoods that are still unreachable except by boat.

''All those people you're seeing relocated to Houston, Dallas, northern Louisiana, across the country -- that's my customer base,'' said Mr. McDonald, a lifelong resident of New Orleans. A courtly man with wavy gray hair, gray mustache and a gravelly voice, he offered a brave half-smile. ''The question is whether most of them will be coming back,'' he added.

Thirty-three years ago, when Liberty was founded, its entire operation fitted in a trailer parked in a corner lot on the east side of New Orleans. ''At the time, there was no minority banking service in New Orleans,'' said Norman C. Francis, Liberty's board chairman and one of its founders. An integrated group of business leaders, Mr. Francis said, pooled $2 million to create the city's first minority-owned bank.

''Liberty was a new symbol of minorities controlling their own capital,'' said Mr. Francis, the president of Xavier University in New Orleans. ''It was a new experience for our customers to see black tellers and black branch managers.''

When the bank opened in 1972, its first president was Mr. McDonald, then 29 years old, a waiter's son who had worked his way up to vice president at a local bank. He was put in charge of a staff of six.

Liberty today is one of the five largest black-owned financial institutions in the country, offering an array of services from personal accounts, mortgages and small-business loans to credit cards and insurance. Last year, it ranked third on Black Enterprise magazine's list of top black-owned banks. Its most recent annual report showed that profits had grown by a robust 22 percent over the previous year, as an aggressive expansion strategy seemed to be paying off.